Tag Archives: ux

On Sunday, Hillary Rodham Clinton announced she would definitely like to be the next President of the United States of America. Before that announcement HillaryClinton.com looked like this: a holding page linking to the website of her official office. HillaryClinton.com on 27th March 2015, retrieved from archive.org

Blue, a notoriously popular colour in web design, seems deployed here according to colour theory:always reassuringly safe, friendly and almost frivolous when light, while the darker blue brings a more serious tone. The background gradient gives an abstract sense of a horizon; the ground and the sky; don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. We’re meant to be reassured. The contrasting darker blue used for the ‘Hillary’ headline – really a logo – fits it quite well: we’re on first name terms with Mrs Clinton, but we’re still encouraged to take her name seriously as a strong and powerful proposition. The colour contrast emphasises the seriousness of ‘Hillary’ as a concept. We’re meant to be impressed.
The gradient is deployed as a background image rather than modern css: old-fashioned but fine for a lightweight single page site. There’s a technical fail, however, whereby the bottom curve of the ‘y’ descender in the logo (also deployed as an image) has been truncated by over-zealous cropping. This could have been avoided with modern web typography – or a steadier hand.

WordCamp Birmingham (UK) 2015 happened last weekend, and seems to have been a great success for all concerned, putting the Birmingham WordPress community in, if you’ll excuse the pun, bullish mood. I certainly enjoyed myself. The event reignited my passion for WordPress and web-work in general, answering a few questions, confirming a few biases and giving me new energy and contacts. For anyone involved in WordPress, whether as a developer, designer, site manager or content creator, I would heartily recommend getting along to your nearest WordCamp. They tend to cater for all tastes and areas of this kind of work, and, as with most conferences and meet-ups, the most interesting conversations occur at the margins outside the programmed content.

But that’s another story. I thought here I’d gather all of the most relevant online stuff I can find from the event: slides of the talks, comments from myself on those talks I attended, comments and a sense of the buzz from others, as well as some of the photos available online. This will be a multi-part post, and in this one I’ll focus on day one.Continue reading WordCamp Brum Roundup – Saturday→

IN a new article on A List Apart, Håkon Wium Lie, the “father of CSS” and CTO of Opera explores how new devices “force us to rethink web design”, as scrolling gives way to app-like paged gestures, and figures will float in multi-column layouts, and to what extent this can be achieved in pure CSS.

While CSS figures and paged gestures are a little while off browser support yet, multi-column layouts are available now (vendor-prefixed), and Håkon gives an example.

To me, this is where CSS code morphs into poetry: one succinct line of code scales from the narrowest phone to the widest TV, from the small print to text for the visually impaired. There is no JavaScript, media queries, or expensive authoring tool involved. There is simply one highly responsive line of code.Håkon Wium Lie

Rather a website becomes part of your product – one channel or manifestation of it. This point stands out in a talk, still engaging today if a little orthodox now, given four years ago by Tom Coates on the web of data, called Everything the Network Touches. It’s an amusing listen and includes some early breakdowns of the “internet of things”.

New version of the ownCloud client

Back in April Jack of all trades Danimo blogged a tour of the ownCloud Client version 1.6, shortly after its beta release. Danimo emphasises a raft of “tremendous performance improvements”, and mentions a switch from Qt 4 to Qt 5 for Windows and Mac OS X (and calls for leads to help achieve this for Linux too). The team “also implemented an item that was on many peoples wish list: a concise sync log“. Version 1.6 was released on 2nd June.

ownCloud version 6.0.4 imminent

Version 6.0.3 of ownCloud was released at the end of April: the changelog includes “performance improvements by reducing the number of chmod operations”, “don´t allow creating a “Shared” folder” and “Documents improvements and fixes”.